EVENTS

Pick a country with a military junta in its recent past

Chris Clarke at Pharyngula quotes a comment:

As an Argentinian I can confirm your “rumours” and add that this guy was a collaborator with the military during the last coup d’etat during the 70′s : Among many things, he informed to the military that two monks that were working in a low income neighbourhood were no longer protected by the catholic church, facilitating their detention and posterior disappearance.

Mind you, to “dissapear” at that time meant to be detained by the military, held without rights or trial, possibly (and often) tortured under suspicions of being a Marxist/ “terrorist”, being completely incomunicated with your family and finally be killed and buried on an unmarked grave, or thrown form a plane into the river.

Comments

It’s totally okay for Francis to have helped the Argentinean junta. The junta consisted of right-wing military dictators, the type the RCC has always been proud to support. Being cozy with fascists is as much a Catholic tradition as misogyny and homophobia.

Wikipedia informs me that the two priests concerned, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, were found alive but drugged five months after being disappeared. Bergoglio insists that he interceded with the junta for their lives, but does not explain why they were not protected from being kidnapped and unlawfully imprisoned.

@ Ulysses “Being cozy with fascists is as much a Catholic tradition as misogyny and homophobia.”

I read somewhere that Argentine Church’s veneration of Nazis and fascists is well printed, through the “Ratlines” which were a structure of escape paths for Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe at the end of WWII. Argentine Bishop Antonio Caggiano offered Argentina as a sanctuary for European war criminals who were hiding in Rome.

Wait, WHAT?!! This guy ratted out people in his own church? This guy is almost an exact photo-negative of how Christians say they behave toward tyrants. Why couldn’t they have elected one of the Argentine Catholics who was persecuted by the junta, instead of a stooge who supported it?

In your last post about this guy, I asked how much sleazier the Church could get. And now I got an answer. I apologize, folks, I promise I’ll never ask that question again.

Hey, at least he didn’t have a reputation for shielding priests from secular authorities, right? This could be why he was elected.

He should have interceded with the College of Cardinals, insisted that he was not fit to be Pope, and explicitly campaigned to have one of those priests (or someone else who had survived similar persecution) elected Pope in his place. That would have been a sincere, eloquent, and effective act of atonement, and would have brought some semblance of honor back to the Church. It would have been a truly CHRISTIAN thing to do, embodying the long-stated Christian virtues of honesty, repentance, self-sacrifice, charity, and putting justice ahead of worldly power or gain. The Church had a chance to do something good on a huge scale, and they screwed the op. Again.

I note from the media that the prosecution – in the case of crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship of 1976 – accused Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio of “lying” and being “reluctant” when giving statements. Luis Zamora, plaintiff attorney (and former national deputy) in the case said that “when someone is reluctant, it is lying, it is hiding part of the truth.”

Must be disappointing for the beeb to find out, after all their sycophantic gushing about the new pope, that he rreferred only a year or so ago to the inhabitants of the Falklands as “usurpers” in a speech at a memorial service, and the islands as part of Mother Argentina……..guess he ain’t going to get along well with Cameron after all..

“that he rreferred only a year or so ago to the inhabitants of the Falklands as “usurpers” ”

I find it rather uncanny that very recently Falkland islanders voted overwhelmingly to remain in Britain. And before we know it, there is a newly elected Argentinian pope – who ‘referred’ ‘to in inhabitants of the Falklands as usurpers.”

“Bergoglio has a very cowardly attitude when it comes to something so terrible as the theft of babies,” Estela de la Cuadra told the AP. “The question is how to save his name, save himself. But he can’t keep these allegations from reaching the public. The people know how he is.”

The Church’s search for Mr (sorry, His Eminence Cardinal) Clean looks like it will be eternal.